How to foster a more innovative culture

Our ideal client is one who’s interested in shifting the entire organization to make innovation a part of their lives, rather than a word in their mission statement. The truth is, everyone knows that it is innovation that makes great companies and differentiates one company from another. For most organizations, since they don’t know how to make that ‘innovation’ thing happen deliberately, sadly the status quo is mostly innovation by chance rather than innovation by design. Our work is to help you to transform your organization by creating a intervention that usually includes the following ingredients:

Assessment

Effective organizations measure where they are, and what is important in their development. Where are you with respect to living a culture of innovation right now? How are you going to know how you’re doing in an on-going way? An effective organizational assessment will give you a clear picture of your current state of affairs and you’ll know how to measure what counts in the future.

Objective Setting:

Innovation is only a ‘fad’ when it’s unclearly connected to the bottom line. Deliberately focusing on where you want/need innovation and setting clear, measurable objectives helps to give people a target to shoot for, and a measure of the effectiveness of your efforts.

Leader Behaviors and Employee Skills

Obviously, an organization is made up of people. So why do so many organizational change efforts focus on putting the same people with the same skills in different boxes on the organizational chart? Through training, facilitation and coaching, we’ll get your executive team and high potentials thinking and behaving in ways that foster innovation in themselves and their line of business. We can also help you be cost effective by training in innovation team skills while doing real work, not ‘simulations’. Make your innovation training a profit center for your company, not a cost. See more about our training programs here.

Accountability Systems

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” says that when you create an incentive for something, you also create an incentive for people to stop doing something else, or to possibly change their behaviors in ways that damage the organization. Rewarding individuals can kill teamwork. Rewarding teamwork can kill individual initiative. Yikes! Smart culture change requires you to think through what you reward and punish to make sure you are not creating costly and unintended consequences. We’ll facilitate a process to make sure you measure the things that matter to your bottom line from an innovation culture perspective.

Idea Management

There are a lot of poorly conceived idea management systems clamoring for your budget. There are a few good ones. We’re not in the business of “IT based” idea capture and intellectual capital management systems, but we’ll help you cut through the hype and make a smart decision for your firm.